Sunday, June 19, 2011

Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.org) and the ICT4Peace Foundation have agreed to jointly develop an enhanced ICT4Peace Crisis Information Management Platform Demonstrator (CIMD), based on Ushahidi's existing platform and as deployed e.g. in Libya including further upgrades such as the 'Luanda' version of the Ushahidi platform and based of specifications provided by ICT4Peace.

The new generation of crowd sourced crisis information management tools have made extraordinary progress in proving valuable information to decision makers in crisis, it is generally recognized, that further developments are needed to provide the necessary tools to validate information through assessing the reliability of the source and the probability of the occurrence. Several stakeholders have different ways of dealing with incoming data relating to a crisis and there is a need for 'bounded' crowdsourcing and 'unbounded' crowdsourcing. Bounded crowdsourcing entails the reporting of information from vetted sources and for that information to be available only to view by the 'bound. The proposed ICT4Peace enhanced CIMD tool will feature the updated 'Luanda' Ushahidi platform with all its built in features and two key plugins.

The Matrix Analysis plugin as outlined on ICT4peace website and as provided on Ushahidi plugin repository. The plugin will be updated to work with the Luanda version of the platform, which is an enhanced version of the platform with many features.

For instance, multiple groups plugin for several separate "bound" and "non bound"-reporting reporting communities on the same platform. This keeps data centralized while allowing each of the groups to keep reports and messages private until they decide to make them public. This can allow for collaboration of different agencies that have varying levels of comfort with sharing data publicly.

### ICT4Peace took root with pioneering research on the role of ICTs in preventing, responding to and recovering from conflict in 2003 and lead to the adoption of Paragraph 36 by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis in 2005 which recognises "...the potential of ICTs to promote peace and to prevent conflict which, inter alia, negatively affects achieving development goals. ICTs can be used for identifying conflict situations through early-warning systems preventing conflicts, promoting their peaceful resolution, supporting humanitarian action, including protection of civilians in armed conflicts, facilitating peacekeeping missions, and assisting post conflict peace-building and reconstruction".

The ICT4Peace Foundation (www.ict4peace.org) works to promote the practical realisation of Paragraph 36 and looks at the role of ICT in crisis management, covering aspects of early warning and conflict prevention, peace mediation, peacekeeping, peace-building as well as natural disaster management and humanitarian operations.